‘I collect the names and make sure the servers are running…and spend the rest of the time fixing my boat’: Tech entrepreneurs, Tonga, and the lucrative scheme to shake up the world wide web | Daily Reports Online
With the world wide web booming in the late 1990s, two entrepreneurs pounced on the situation to sell domains on the cheap while others forked out incredible sums.
The .to domain, the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the Kingdom of Tonga, a tiny island nestled in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, became a popular go-to for many enterprises around this time.
With the domain wars in full flow by 1997, Gullichsen and Lyons sought permission from the Crown Prince to begin selling domain names under the country’s ccTLD.
It’s safe to say the scheme took off, prompting a surge in registrations. All you needed was a valid credit card and $100 and you’d staked your claim in one tiny patch of the burgeoning web.
“I collect the names and make sure the servers are running,” Lyons told Time, “and spend the rest of the time fixing my boat.”
Domains are a different beast today
Nearly 30 years on from Gullichsen and Lyons’ venture, the web is a different beast entirely. There were little over one million websites in existence at the time of the .to venture, but within a space of a few short years this had skyrocketed.
Figures from September 2025 showed there are an estimated 1.2 billion websites globally, with roughly 175 websites created every minute.
Creating a website has never been easier. Web users now have a plethora of site building tools and platforms to draw from, many of which take just a few clicks to get a working website going.
Domains, meanwhile, are equally accessible and cheap – a far cry from the wild west gold rush of the late 1990s.
